SOUTHERN THEATRE: God’s Time

If Italy is really going to fight Great Britain for supremacy in Africa, she must launch an overland campaign to take Alexandria. Main base for this attack must be Libya, where, since Air Marshal Italo Balbo’s death,* fire-eating Marshal Rodolfo Graziani has been getting ready. (Onset of the rainy season in Ethiopia had slowed up preparations for a supplementary attack northward up the Nile tributaries from the Sudan border.)

Hopping-off place for Graziani’s attack is Tobruch, Italy’s coastal base near the Egyptian border, protected by nearby air bases at El Aden and El Gubbi. These three spots have been targets for incessant British air raids, to prevent an expeditionary force from getting organized. Last week torpedo-carrying Fairey Swordfish planes of the Naval Air Service climaxed these attacks by striking transports, supply ships and a tanker in Tobruch harbor.

Britain’s harassing, guerrilla tactics along the Libyan border with light tanks and armored trucks stung the Italians, just after Balbo’s death, into attempting a Blitzkrieg drive with a mechanized column of more than 1,000 men on the fortified British coastal base of Sollum, 75 miles east of Tobruch. The British broke up this effort with a flanking attack, and the survivors took refuge in the deserted adobe Fort Capuzzo. There they still were after a thirsty week, sucking stones to eke out their water supply, which the British cut off by removing many sections of the pipeline down from Bardia. British artillery, pounding their defenses, drove them into trenches. British shells and a detachment of light tanks broke up an Italian column of 20 trucks sent to relieve the beleaguered expedition.

> On the other side of Alexandria, at Haifa in Palestine, where the British oil pipeline from Mosul reaches tidewater, the Italians claimed a success last week which the British did not deny. Ten big Italian bombers, flying at great altitude from the Dodecanese Islands, giving the British bases at Cyprus a wide berth, dumped 50 bombs on the Haifa oil terminal and refinery, started fires which burned for days afterward. British pursuit ships from a base on Mt. Carmel were too late to overhaul the hit-&-run Italians.

> On the Kenya front, last fortnight’s mechanized Italian drive on Moyale pinched off the northeast prong of Kenya Colony which projects into Ethiopia.

> Little brown Haile Selassie, whom Britain again recognizes as Ethiopia’s rightful Emperor, passed by plane through Khartoum on his way to join his warriors somewhere on his former country’s border. Said he: “Italy has set the seal of her own doom and has provided my people with the moment to strike. . . . We shall fight with the utmost tenacity. . . . God’s time is now at hand!”

* Correspondent Edmond Taylor of CBS, upon his return from Italy last week, said that Balbo was shot down while flying a party of friends on a sightseeing trip over Tobruch, just as Italy announced officially. But Italy’s suppression of the bad news for two days or so gave the British a chance to say, truthfully, that no R. A. F. planes operated over Tobruch that later day, thus casting sinister mystery over Balbo’s death.